With the chair in the sea

This summer I noticed that young people go to the sea with a chair. And I'm not referring to young people who have ceased to be young, but to very young people. Some carry a deck chair, but most, a folding chair. You see them with the chair, but also with the umbrella, a large cooler, a basket with the picnic, lunch boxes and with clothes hanging from the umbrella. They set up on the rocks or on the beach as if they were at home. I like the attitude.

When I was very young – not young as now – the folding chairs by the sea were carried by grandfathers and grandmothers. We looked at them with tenderness, sometimes with irony, convinced that whoever carried a chair to the sea had reached that age when they could no longer bend much to sit on the ground, or that the rocks hurt their bones more than ours. By the way, we went with our 'cranqueres' on, which still seem to me the natural footwear for walking on rocks and the sea.

A parenthesis: why is it so difficult to find classic deck chairs like the ones from way back when? The authentic ones, the ones that haven't become a fashionable item and don't cost as if they were designer shoes. This summer I looked for them all over Palma and ended up going to Manacor. There, yes. But let's get back to the chair.

Now the younger generation arrive at the seaside with their small domestic equipment. They form circles or sit in pairs, so close and so well settled that they look like a married couple old enough to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. And I find it endearing. Not because I think they have grown old before their time, but because perhaps they have found a way to set up, even if only for a few hours, the seaside apartment they will probably never be able to afford.

So, a couple of chairs, a canvas roof, the cooler, lunch, a towel, and clothes drying in the wind. A temporary home by the sea. I myself put two folding chairs and a small table in the car and told a friend if she wanted to come for an aperitif at my little seaside 'flat'. And we settled on the rocks, I won't say from where. Very alert.

In any case, it's not a minor issue where we decide to set up 'the little flat'. We've had to give up a good part of the beaches because we don't fit. Saturation has also made it more difficult to do something as simple as going to the sea, even if we didn't swim. Because here we've always said 'going to the sea'. And it's worth reclaiming it.

Perhaps there is something more to this invasion of chairs, loungers and other domestic items by the sea. It is a way of taking a position, and possession. Of making our own, for a while, a space from which, in one way or another, we are being pushed out. Like dinners on the slice. Like eating on the ground on the Born promenade.

Perhaps that's why I like these folding chairs, and even more so when they are carried by the younger ones. Because, without knowing it, these young people who remind us of our grandparents of a time, what they are doing is something that has always been very young: inventing a place to be.